Pakistan: When You Think About It, We Killed bin Laden

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Pakistan: When You Think About It, We Killed bin Laden

Sure, you only think that a SEAL team choppered into Abbottabad and killed Osama bin Laden after the Pakistanis proved unwilling or unable to do it themselves. That's only because you're not not seeing the big picture behind the raid. Or so the Pakistani military would have you believe.

After four days of discombobulation in the wake of bin Laden's killing, the Pakistani military has finally issued a statement about the Abbottabad raid. The short version is they deserve the credit – and the U.S. better not do anything like this again.

CIA Director Leon Panetta and White House counterterrorism aide John Brennan have both said that they didn't share information on the raid with the Pakistanis because they feared a bin Laden tipoff. President Obama, more diplomatically, gave Pakistan merely measured praise for prior intelligence help when announcing the operation. But if you ask the Pakistani brass, the U.S. merely opened the pickle jar after the Pakistanis loosened it up for them.

The powerful Inter-Services Intelligence branch "has no parallel" as a counterterrorism entity, the military statement reads, as it's responsible for "around 100 top level Al Qaeda leaders / operators were killed / arrested... with or without support of CIA." In fact, despite the lack of intel sharing on the Abbottabad raid, which runs "contrary to the existing practice between the two services," the real origin of the raid is "intelligence based on initial information provided by ISI."

So there you have it. It was the Pakistanis who really put the Xs on bin Laden's eyes. Even though they didn't know anything about the raid. Because they gave information on al-Qaida in Pakistan... sometime ago... and the raid eventually happened. (Notice it's the same argument made by torture advocates.)

But ISI also pretends to be gracious, "admitting" its "own shortcomings in developing intelligence on the presence of Osama Bin Laden in Pakistan." That's not an admission. It's a denial. If the ISI is such a crackerjack intelligence service, how could it have missed out on the world's most wanted terrorist living in the shadow of the Pakistani military academy?

Then the military pivots. Any additional Special Operations raids, "the sovereignty of Pakistan, will warrant a review on the level of military / intelligence cooperation with the United States," it vows. (You'd think a country that's *received *$20 billion in aidin a decade would take a different tone with the vendor.) So not only is Pakistan ultimately responsible for the raid, but if the raid's repeated, the U.S. is going to be in a lot of trouble.

Of course, cutting cooperation with the U.S. is a recipe for more unilateral raids, not less, and certainly more drone strikes. Those are real possibilities as U.S. intelligence sifts through the hard drives recovered from bin Laden's compound for clues to the whereabouts of more al-Qaida operatives. If that kind of downward spiral in the U.S.-Pakistani relationship is what Pakistan's military seeks, expect many more statements like this.